7 comments:

I should though remind you that there was a discussion awhile back in which you claimed (as is usual for you, erroneously) that some Dutch or Portuguese or Romanian had actually said that the language of nature is math while I said it was Galileo Galilei.

Seems that the Oxonians bought that line like I did and you owe me another VCP.

Galileo had a great mind in another way too, the article indicates: He viewed the structure of scientific theory as reality rather than mathematical trick. POWWW!! I think this way too but have always discounted "natural philosophy" as a nutless pursuit for those lacking chops in PDE.

But Galileo didn't know from PDE, so he had to invent them and solve them. Double-POWWW!!

Feynman's path-integrals come to mind,..., but that's another book that I would trust only Wheeler to write.

Thanks again for this. The noxious urge to talk about global warming has subsided.

Herr Rott, there was no discussion in which I claimed that some Dutch or Portuguese or Romanian had said "the language of nature is math", as opposed to Galileo having said it. In his "The Assayer" Galileo wrote:"Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth." And no one disputes that he wrote this. Perhaps you meant to refer to a discussion where I set out that Galileo's views were not original with him, but were instead part of a long tradition dating [as far the historical record shows] back to the older science of ancient Greece. It is clear with the school of Pythagoras, for example.

Perhaps you are referring to some discussion with Tecumseh? He knows best how Coanda Rulz.

As for PDE's, we did at least once discuss your claim that without PDE's there is no science, and so the Greeks had no science. But then Galileo had no science, nor Huygen, nor Newton, for they certainly had no PDE. [or are you referring to any sort of DE? In which case there was no science until Fermat got the derivative game going]. Tough shit for Archimedes or Galen or Ptolemy or Al Haytham or Kepler...but then when it comes to his science Herr Rott is as tough as a Sherman in sight of Atlanta.

The closest to that was Kepler, before he upchucked the turdekahedronic for the elliptical. Pythagoras was more about the harmonies of "the music of the spheres", or about associating number dimensions to space-plane-line-point, etc